But this year, January 1st is on a Saturday, just kind of an odd day of the week to begin starting a new you. Now, this is totally arbitrary. All of its arbitrary, right? 365 days is somewhat arbitrary that we chose that that was a year, seven days in a week is arbitrary Saturday being not the beginning of the week. Even this idea that the weekends are for fun. We have all kind of made this up. We’ve made this up collectively as a society. So lot of people would agree. Yeah, the new year starts on January 1st and you know, Saturday is not the beginning of the week, but notice how the culture around us, the people around us contribute to some thoughts that we have, that we don’t challenge. We just accept them to be true. Or we go with the flow. Right? Another example of that is how a lot of people like to have a kind of a party atmosphere on Friday after work like Friday at like four or five, it’s a lot of America decides, Hey, we’re done working.

We’re gonna feel kind of like we’re in a party atmosphere, just very different than some Catholics who have a really somber Friday. Right? And we all get to choose how we want to think about days and the beginning of the year and events that happen and rhythms of our culture and our society in our community. But I want you to just notice the force that moves your decisions, right? If you feel pressure to do something on a Monday versus a Saturday, why and do you like your reasons, I’m not telling you what to do, but sometimes we feel like there’s this outside pressure telling us what to do. And that is what I want you to question.

Do you want to start things on Mondays or on January 1st or whenever you decide that you want to start things, and the reason that this ties into repairing your relationship with yourself is we often bow to social pressure, even if nobody’s doing it to us, right? It’s sometimes it’s just in our minds and we do this against our own wishes sometimes. So let’s say you wanted to give up sugar this year. And as January 1st was approaching, you’re like, okay, we’re gonna do it on January, but then you got to January 1st and it was a Saturday and the kids were still home and they’re still Christmas leftovers. And you decide, well, I don’t want to push through the status quo. Like the pressure of my community who are still eating sugar all star on Monday, Monday, January 3rd. And then we get to Monday and sometimes it doesn’t feel like a new beginning.

It feels like the kids are still home. The chocolates are still around and that’s when we go, well, we’re Catholic. So we celebrate Christmas for 12 days. So Christmas isn’t really over, or until epiphany. So maybe you keep the sugar atmosphere going through epiphany. And now some of you guys even celebrate Christmas all the way up to candlemass, but just notice how I’m renegotiating with myself. And there is one part of me that knows that my body feels a lot better when I stop eating sugar. And I had clarity about that at some point, and I wanted to do it, but then I allowed some arbitrary things like calendars and other people’s schedules to distract me and to pull me away from what I said was important to me. And this is an example of breaking trust with yourself. This is an example of saying, Hey honey, what you want and what you think is best for you. It doesn’t really matter. We’re gonna choose this other thing instead. And even though you are the one choosing it, nobody probably made you make that choice or eat any sugar. There’s kind of two voices inside of our heads. And we talked about this before. There’s kind of your, your Saint voice, your thinking voice, your rational voice, your grounded voice, the voice of you walking closely with the holy spirit. And you feel things calmly with peace and joy and surety.

And then there’s this other part of you that reacts from fear and scarcity. And doesn’t wanna miss out on things and doesn’t wanna look bad or doesn’t like conflict. And when we let that voice take over and make decisions for ourselves, we break trust with ourselves. When we allow fear to run the show, we break trust with ourselves. And so I want you to think about the last 12 days and some moments you had when you were calm. Maybe you were praying, maybe you were on a walk. Maybe you were laying in bed before you got up in the morning.

And you kind of just knew that there was something you needed to do in your life, a change that you needed to make you needed to add something in, or take something out or begin a new project. God speaks to us in the quiet moment. And when he does, it feels very comforting. We feel convicted to do something it’s very lovely, but it doesn’t take long for us to step into the world and have the culture and our community start clinging around and making noise. And then we get scared. And when we get scared, we cut and run on ourselves. It’s too much friend. I know you said you wanted this. And it was really important to you, but I can’t do it. I can’t be there for you. I can’t support you through this. I can’t honor what we decided.

And all of us are doing this in big ways. And in small ways, this is just a human brain thing that we do. But it was interesting because in our great life blueprint workshop, so many women uncovered that they felt unworthy to set goals. And I think they knew that this is what was gonna come up. They were going to set a goal, feel excited, know that that’s, you know, deep down what their body needed or what their mind needed or what their life needed, but that they were gonna get to these moments where the idea of what someone else wants or the idea of potential conflict is enough to knock us off course because a lot of us, you know, we use the kids or our husband or our schedules as an excuse to not take care of ourselves, but pretty rarely are those things directly challenging what we want to do. It’s usually just our thoughts about them, right? We just think, oh, I’ve gotta spend more time for the kids. It’s too much for me to take, you know, an hour and a half out of, you know, most days to go to the gym or to cut sugar out of the family diet or to cut screens off at 5:00 PM and only do books after that.

And sometimes even the things that don’t affect the family at all, we still create reasons why we shouldn’t do it for the family. And I want to show you that this is why women have such a wretched relationship with themselves because we kind of know what we need. We know what we want. And then we keep shoving that voice in a box and not doing it. And I think a lot of it comes down to worthiness, feeling worthy, take up space, feeling worthy, to use time, feeling worthy, to focus on ourselves. And it’s interesting because I don’t think the world is telling us not to do that as much as we think it is. I think a lot of it’s going on in our minds.

I think a lot of us, if we told our husband, you know what, I really need this thing, time, money, space, whatever it was, this is what I need. And we were calm about it. He would say yes. And if we explained it to the children like we don’t tell the children, Hey, I’m gonna need five minutes, twice a day to brush my teeth. It’s really important. Taking care of your teeth is really important. So I’m gonna need this time. I won’t be able to spend time with you when I’m brushing my teeth. We don’t explain it like that. We don’t couch it in that language. Like it’s a big deal, but we do that with a lot of other things. Or we think if I’m doing thing or taking this time or taking up space, it’s probably not good for the kids or I’m being a burden or it’s creating a hassle.

So I want you to think about your decision-making behavior in the last 12 days from January 1st to January 12th or whenever you’re listening to this, what did you hear in those calm, still moments that you knew to be true, that you knew to be something that you wanted to work on. And then how have you been negotiating with yourself since then? And I don’t want you to think about this with guilt or shame. I really just want you to be curious and notice, huh? I do keep getting to this crossroads. And then I tell myself a story that I can’t do. The thing I said I wanted to do.

What is your reason? And is it true or is it something completely made up? Like why would we ever start new habits on a Saturday? Let me tell you that when you get a cancer diagnosis and they tell you, you have to stop smoking or eating a certain thing or living a certain way, you don’t care what day of the week they, that is you do it one way that you can repair your relationship with yourself is just to start noticing how you talk to yourself, what you allow to pull you off the path. To me, the path of sainthood is the, as becoming the best version of myself and doing the things that I hear in those quiet, still moments. I believe that comes from God, his voice. It always calms us.

It makes us feel convicted to do something. Even if we know it’s challenging, the idea of it feels good because it comes from him and it is very easy to be pulled off the track. And we’re never going to figure out how to do it perfectly. I want you to just bring awareness to how often it’s happening and see if you can just decrease a little bit. See if you can come up with new ways to refocus your brain, Hey brain!, I see that you don’t wanna do this, cuz that’s a Saturday, but that’s just a made-up construct. And I really wanna do this. And I love myself and I am worthy of taking care of myself. I am worthy of this work. I am worthy of time. I am worthy of this space that I take up in this life.

I came across this verse recently and I was chewing on it. Kind of breaking it down in my head. It’s Jeremiah 17 verse seven, but blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord whose confidence is in him. And we’ve done an episode on the difference between self confide and confidence. So self-confidence is knowing that you have your own back, which is a little bit what we’re talking about today, right? Repairing your relationship and doing what you say you’re gonna do is the way that we create self-confidence. But confidence comes from practicing something from doing something so often that you feel very confident. You could do it. Most of you’re very confident that you could drive a car or make coffee.

Although, oddly enough, I went to an advent Reese-making party and one of my friends like very sweetly texted us and was like, I actually don’t drink coffee. And I’m not totally sure how to make it. And when I read that text, I thought, you know what? I’m not really sure how to make coffee. I feel like I fake it every time. And I’m like, ah, that looks right. And I taste it. And I’m like, it’s mostly bitter and needs milk and something sweet in it. So I would not claim that I have confidence in how to make coffee. Well, confidence comes from practice. And so I was thinking about this verse and thinking, but bless it is the one who trusts in the Lord whose confidence is in him.

And I thought, what if we replace that word confidence with practice or one who is practice in being with the Lord? What if the way that we are confident in God is by spending time with him hearing that still small voice and then practicing doing it, what it says and seeing how that goes. Like, oh, remember when we were praying, this is what we heard. Yeah. I don’t feel like doing it today or yeah. I feel guilty taking up the time or, yeah, there’s a lot of snow on the ground right now. But remember when we were spending time with God, this is what we heard clearly. This is how we felt.

So I’m gonna show up and I’m gonna practice with him. Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord whose confidence is in him. If we wanna be confident in the Lord, we have to practice trusting the Lord. And when we really trust someone, right? When there’s a lot of trusts there, we’re not always second-guessing what they say. So when you have quiet time with the Lord and you hear him speak something into your heart and place something on your heart and you trust him, you’re gonna do it. Even on the days, you don’t feel like it. And it seems hard, or it seems like it would be a burden to your family, for you to do this thing that you decided, blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him.

I wanna create an army of women who know how to hear God’s voice and have the courage to do what he says. Do you wanna be part of that army? Do you wanna be that kind of woman? Do you wanna stand up against whatever is happening around us and say, you know what, when God tells me what to do, I do it. I don’t wait for a Monday. When I see a way to take care of myself, I do it because I am training to be a Saint because I am being called to do the work of God. And he gives us instructions.

I’m just praying for all of us. All of us are caught in this world. That’s loud and noisy and is pulling us away from the path of sainthood all the time. And I want us to take ownership of that instead of blaming the outside things. I want us to notice by paying attention to our thinking that we are doing it to ourselves. Most of the time, it is pretty rare that anyone from the culture is coming to our homes and making us do something. So I want you to pay attention to your behavior in the last 12 days.

When are the moments when you are not doing what you said you wanted to do, and then you can ask yourself one of two questions was that thing really important to me, maybe you didn’t hear it in a still small moment with the Lord. Maybe you just thought it was a goal that sounded good. And now you’re kind of playing it out. And you’re like, I have no peace while I’m doing this. Sometimes I do think we need to change our aim, the goal or the habit or whatever we’re going after. Sometimes I think we did decide that with the Lord, we did hear him. We did feel moved. It was a desire of our hearts.

And then we just need to be curious. Why did I step off the path? What did I, I allow to pull me off the path? What were your thoughts? I guarantee you had some thoughts that created the action of you not doing what you said you wanted to do. So I just wanna wrap up with one more Bible verse that really speaks to how incredibly special and worthy you are. You are worthy to take up space. You are worthy to be heard. You are worthy to take care of yourself. You are worthy to have dreams and goals and to go after them.

And this comes from Luke chapter 12, verse seven. In fact, even the hairs on your head are numbered. Do not be afraid. You are more valuable than many sparrows. God gives the animals exactly what they need. And then in this verse it says, so why are you worried? Cuz you are infinitely more valuable than that. Even the hairs and in your head are numbered. Just such an incredible thing to think about, to think that there is somebody with such knowledge and such love for us, that they know the numbers of hair on our heads. That is how special you are. That is how worthy you are. That is how closely God is paying attention to you. He doesn’t forget about you. You are not lost. You are not unimportant to him. You are everything. And he will give you everything. You need to fulfill the desires of your heart and to keep you on the path to sainthood.

While we were doing the great life blueprint workshop, a lot of women chose the goal of repairing their relationship with themselves. Either by building trust with themselves. By speaking more kindly to themselves, I was very surprised and heartened by how many of them did not choose measurable goals. But instead chose this thing, this thing that they just instinctively knew, it was time to work on repairing our relationship with ourselves, building trust with ourselves, seeing ourselves as so valuable, what a wonderful thing to spend a year working on. So I want to invite you to ask yourselves two questions about whatever, whatever growth was on your heart at the beginning of the year one, do you wanna keep it? Did you decide that from a place of peace and love and sitting with the Lord or did you decide it from fear and scarcity or something that seemed popular or sounded good right?

We get to change. Our minds now is a really good time to very calmly say, you know what? I don’t think that was the right thing for me right now. But if it is the right thing, if you do feel like God spoke it into your heart, and I want you to pay attention to anything that has pulled you off the path, he got a piece of paper and write down, what were the moments? What were the thoughts? Are those thoughts? True? What could I be thinking instead? What do I need to think at that moment in order to stay on the path? This is what mindset coaching is all about. And Catholic mindset coaching is about doing it with the Lord.

So we are praying for you. We’re praying that you have the courage to pursue sainthood, to do what God is asking you to do. And we just want you to know that you are part of a community of Catholic women who are praying for each other. And that is powerful in God’s economy that has a lot of value. So let’s live in God’s economy and see what we can do with this year, cuz women are powerful and we can change at any time and grow into who God is asking us to be. We believe in you because mama you or Made for Greatness.